


loneliness has teeth: dualscar

by coldhope



Series: HHCOD fills [27]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, HHCOD request fic, Hurt/Comfort, gill trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-17
Updated: 2013-07-17
Packaged: 2017-12-20 12:38:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/887370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He would have been perfectly fine if it weren't for the fact that the bloody eel had had a bloody <i>mate</i>. The irony of this was not entirely lost on Orphaner Dualscar, perennially matespritless and currently picking needlelike eel teeth out of his left-side opercula. To add insult to injury, he'd not managed to hold on to the first eel when its better half attacked him, so dinner tonight was going to be whatever his crew could scrounge up from the diminishing stores. All the jokes about weevils were wearing rather thin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	loneliness has teeth: dualscar

request: Dualscar + gill damage/infection, suffering through it on his own like a MAN except all he really wants is someone to pap him and stop the pain - and he knows it's not going to happen.

~

He would have been perfectly fine if it weren't for the fact that the bloody eel had had a bloody _mate_. The irony of this was not entirely lost on Orphaner Dualscar, perennially matespritless and currently picking needlelike eel teeth out of his left-side opercula. To add insult to injury, he'd not managed to hold on to the first eel when its better half attacked him, so dinner tonight was going to be whatever his crew could scrounge up from the diminishing stores. All the jokes about weevils were wearing rather thin. 

It hurt badly enough for him to be hissing under his breath as he tweezed the little thorns of translucent enamel out of himself: he was only lucky he'd managed to slam all of the slits closed before the thing bit him, because if it had gotten the delicate gill filaments themselves he would probably have passed out. He dropped the teeth on the table one by one, and regarded the small heap without love. 

"I should send you to Spin," he told them, and tugged the cork from a flask of brandy with his own teeth, taking a long swig before splashing it over the ragged purple wounds in his side. This time he wasn't able to keep the hiss under his breath, and the wooden edge of the table splintered under the pressure of his grip. Eventually, though, the pain subsided to a bearable throb, and he wrapped a scarf round his chest as a makeshift bandage and went to find a shirt that didn't have holes in it.

He didn't have a ship's surgeon on board, for several reasons, and he was basically capable of sorting himself out when wind, weather, or ill luck damaged him; but there was something about the way the bites were throbbing as he went back up on deck that didn't feel quite right. It would have been nice to have someone else look at them. 

~

Two days later he passed the word for the first mate and, grim-faced and sweating, told him to have someone boil a large pot of seawater and bring it to his cabin. Of course the crew had noticed there was something wrong with him; they knew their captain well enough not to ask questions. Dualscar was a fairly skilled mariner, if not a naturally gifted one like Mindfang, and he didn't keelhaul his people unless he was _really_ ticked off at them, but his temper was still nothing to be cavalier about. The water was duly brought, and the first mate cuffed a couple of the able-seamen round the ear and told them not to listen at keyholes, was they hatched in an agricultural storage facility. 

He waited until he had heard the footsteps retreat down the passage, and then worked his way out of his shirt as best he could with his side on sick fire. Under the scarf, the bites were swollen, the skin and thicker edges of the opercula glistening with fluid, weeping purple down his side. Breathing hurt; moving hurt. Dualscar soaked a clean cloth in the seawater and folded it up into a compress, stone-faced, and shut his eyes as the hot saline touched the wounds. 

He'd had gill infections before, of course, most seadwellers had at some point, and they always went away, but they were _miserable_ while they lasted. At least this one wasn't making him cough. He wrung out the cloth and dipped it again in the seawater, threads of his violet turning and drifting under the surface. It was going to be a long day. 

~

It was a long four nights and days before there was any real improvement, and that only came after he'd made himself not only bathe the bite wounds with seawater, but run it through his gills properly, swimming underwater. That hurt almost as badly as the bites themselves had done, but it was easier to hide. Underwater nobody could see the pain-tears, and he could make all the faces he pleased without being remarked upon. But more and more, as he grimly went through the motions of cleansing the wounds, bandaging and rebandaging, he tried hard not to think how bloody nice it'd be if somebody _else_ were doing this. 

Mindfang would have snorted at him and made him wash the bites out properly when it happened, and then suggested he put some gold rings in the new piercings in his opercula, and probably he would have been tromping around on deck right now shouting commands into the freshening wind instead of gritting his teeth and dabbing at himself with a folded-up washcloth like sixteen kinds of an idiot. 

(That didn't help.)

He'd very rarely found himself in need of companionship, or comfort: those were for other people. Lesser people who couldn't get it together on their own. Still, as he carefully lay back in his bunk, on his right side, Dualscar couldn't help admitting he would gladly and gratefully welcome help. He wanted the pain to go away, he wanted to be able to breathe without strain, he wanted to stop shivering and sweating and having terrible dreams about things with vast pointed venomous teeth. 

And there wasn't anyone he trusted to help him. Even if there had been people who wanted to, which there wasn't, and that was his own doing. Orphaner Dualscar didn't have friends, or want them. Orphaner Dualscar worked his own way, needed no one, was incapable of romance other than blackrom (and to be painfully honest, he wasn't very good at that either, he kept wanting to flip red for Mindfang and it probably showed), and nobody gave a dribbling shit if Orphaner Dualscar got his idiot gills bitten to shreds by a giant possibly poisonous eel. 

Sometimes loneliness had teeth.

_Sod this_ , he thought, and reached in the storage cabinet built under the bunk for his bottle of brandy. That at least did not judge or sneer, even if it did make his head pound and his stomach churn the next day. A hangover was a small price to pay for a few hours of blissful mental peace. He’d get over this, he always did, he was Dualscar; but sometimes—like now—he wished fervently that he could be almost anybody else.


End file.
